Whole new thing

 Well, isn't this just the world turned cattywampus.

Remember back in the day -- and I mean really back in the day -- when college hoopers of a certain refinement could declare something called "hardship" and enter the NBA draft before their college eligibility ran out?

Didn't really matter whether the hardship was actually hardship (though in a lot of cases it was). It was a slick little loophole for players to escape the collegiate plantation and start drawing a hefty paycheck for doing what they were good at. And a lot of guys did that.

Bound forward over an Everest of years and a foothill of decades, change "guys" to "gals", and check out what's happening here in the year of our Lord 2025.

Seems the women are declaring anti-hardship. Or something very like it.

In the last week, a couple of them with college eligibility still to run have decided to stick around campus -- some campus, anyway -- for another year rather than enter the WNBA draft. And this despite the fact both players were likely to be lottery picks in said draft.

The first, Notre Dame guard Olivia Miles, was projected to be the No. 2 pick in the draft and ship out for Seattle and the Storm. She's decided to enter the transfer portal instead, on account of she can probably make more money next season via NIL deals than the Storm would be willing or able to pay her.

And the second player to announce she's foregoing the WNBA?

That would be LSU guard Flau'Jae Johnson, also a virtual lottery lock, who was last seen scoring 28 points for the 3-seed Tigers in their Elite Eight loss to top-seeded UCLA. This season she averaged 18.6 points and was a third-team All-America.

But she's got a cozy NIL deal with Unrivaled which includes equity in Unrivaled's 3-on-3 league, which just concluded its inaugural season. This, again, almost surely makes her more financially secure than any WNBA team could make her. So Johnson will stick around Baton Rouge or wherever for another year, because the WNBA will still be around next year and, if Johnson has another stickout season, her draft status will likely rise still further.

This of course knocks the whole concept of "turning pro" into a cocked hat, because Miles and Johnson and college players of their stature have already turned pro in everything but name.  The NCAA so botched the NIL and transfer portal rollout that virtually every college kid who can hit the J or bang the glass is a perpetual free agent, jumping from one school to another to another in an unending search for the chunkier deal.

It's a model that simply isn't sustainable, and everyone knows it. It remains only for the schools to finally admit their "student-athletes" really are paid employees after all, and start signing them to contracts the way they would some hotshot coach.

Now, I don't know if two players opting to stay in college because the potential money's better constitutes a trend, but it kinda feels like it. And in a backassward sort of way, it lends weight to WNBA player complaints that they are grotesquely underpaid in light of the league's Caitlin Clark-fueled explosion. 

That they are grotesquely underpaid is beyond debate; Clark, the driving force behind the WNBA's surge in popularity, will make just over $78,000 this year to play for the Indiana Fever. The average NBA player is making just shy of $12 million -- or not quite 154 times more.

This is not to say WNBA players should be paid what NBA players are paid; even Clark admits that's ridiculous. But it is saying they should be paid more than they are.

Especially when a potential lottery pick can decide to "stay in school" and make more money.

World turned cattywampus. Oh, you bet.

Cruds and stuff

 We're officially one week into the baseball season, and that means it's as good a time as any for our first Cruds Alert of the new campaign. And there is both exciting news and no news at all on that fr-

Hey, where are you going? 

(Background noise of desks being pushed back, hurried footsteps, panicked cries of "No! Not the stupid Pirates!" and "Run for your lives before he says 'Buccos' again!")

Oh, relax. This isn't about my Buccos.

Well. Not entirely.

I will say the "no news at all" part of today's report is that my Cruds have already moved into their accustomed digs in the NL Central, which is to say the cellar. At 2-5, they're a half-game adrift of the next-to-last Brewers. Of course, they're also just 2.5 games out of first, which means the division title is still in reach.

OK, so no. No, it probably isn't.

But you know what?

There is exciting news in Crudville. As promised.

That's because the Chicago What Sox, the worst baseball team in modern history last season, are off to a glittering 2-4 start. This means that, after an entire week, they're tied for first in the AL Central. Giddy joy is presumably unrestrained on the south side.

Then again ...

Then again, the What Sox are also tied for last place in the Central. This is because everyone in the division is 2-4. Heck, if Connie Mack came back from the dead and brought his old Philadelphia A's with him, they'd probably be 2-4.

At that, they'd still be a game better than the Colorado Rockies, who were the worst team in the National League last year and apparently no better this year. The Rockies are 1-4 and already five-and-a-half games out of first in the NL West, where the grotesquely loaded Dodgers are 8-0 and probably headed for a 160-win season or something. 

So who's the Cruddiest of the Cruds right now?

Surprisingly, it's the Atlanta Braves, who are off to an 0-7 start and likely wondering what  happened to all that tall cotton in which they used to be awash. The Phillies are already five games clear of them, and the Marlins, of all people, are four games ahead of them. 

The Marlins! Who lost an even 100 games last year.

The baseball gods are cruel.

Rumor milled

Look, we all know what social media is. It's that nice thing we can't have because some thoughtless gomer tracked mud all over it, or smeared it with his or her greasy fingerprints, or used it as as a shop rag to wipe 10W30 off his/her hands.

"But that was my favorite Whitesnake tee!" you cry.

 "So?" the gomers reply.

This is kind of what they're saying to Mary Kate Cornett right now.

If you don't know her name, it's because there's no reason you should, but of course that's not the way the social media hellsphere works. People do know her name now, and it's all because the gomers decided her life was their business. They decided to wipe their hands on it, and now she's that ruined Whitesnake tee and wants to know what she did to deserve this.

The answer, of course, is nothing.

The answer is Mary Kate Cornett was just an 18-year-old freshman at Ole Miss until she started dating a certain BMOC, and a handful of troglodytes started spreading vile, baseless rumors (i.e.: blatant lies) about her. That's just what some people do, and, no, I don't know why. Because the world is over-served with  asshats, I suppose.

I mean, just look at the collection of insufferable clods running the show in Washington these days. Talk about Asshat Central.

Anyway, the rumors/lies would have been bad enough for Ms. Cornett had they just been confined to campus. But then the social media gomers got hold of them, and, being the Junior Fire Marshal journos they imagine themselves to be ("We got badges and everything!"), decided a college freshman's private life was Big Honkin' News.

So here was Pat McAfee of ESPN, a gomer first-class, yapping about it on his widely listened to/watched show. And two guys from Barstool Sports, that bastion of oafish seventh-grade-boy misogyny. And an ESPN St. Louis radio host. And former NFL wide receiver/certified loon Antonio Brown, another gomer first-class.

The Barstool Sports guys were a couple of yapping poodles who go by the online handles Jack Mac and KFC. The St. Louis poodle was Doug Vaughn. Just to get their names out there.

Thanks to them, but mostly thanks to McAfee, Mary Kate Cornett has been thoroughly rumor milled, with predictable results. Asshat America, remember? 

And so she started getting mail calling her a slut and a whore, surprise, surprise. Was moved into emergency housing and switched to online classes because of the harassment.  Her family's home was even "swatted" -- i.e., someone called in a false report that brought the police SWAT unit to their door.

All because McAfee and the rest of the gomers thought her business was their business.

Now Cornett and her family are thinking about dropping a lawsuit on McAfee's head, and by proxy on ESPN's. In a fair world they'd win and lighten a few wallets, but, again, it's not a fair world. That's because the phrase "social media" includes the word "media."

One of the most nefarious things the gomers have done, see, is blur the line between what is mere entertainment, and what is the legitimate gathering of news. The gomers tap-dance on either side of that line, and they're pretty slick about it -- slick enough that they can defend themselves by claiming any salacious rumors they were amplifying were legitimate news because of Mary Kate Cornett's connection to a legitimate news personage, and how about that First Amendment, boys and girls?

You see the problem here. They're not really media in the traditional sense, all these yapping poodles, but in 2025 the traditional sense no longer applies. If the Pat McAfees cannot in any way be regarded as newsmen, the blurring of that aforementioned line allows them to operate within the newsman's framework.

No matter how poorly the newsman's hat fits them. And with what reckless disregard they wear it.

Inhospitable

 Saw a post (actually a re-post) from a friend of mine yesterday in which someone named Mike Rothschild asked a very good question on the Magic X Twitter Thingy, and I wish I had an answer for it.

Or rather, an answer that's different from the obvious one.

The question Mr. Rothschild asks, see, alludes to the 2026 World Cup and 2028 Olympic Games, both of which are scheduled to happen on American soil. Mr. Rothschild wonders what would possess any international athletes or fans from other countries to come to America for either, given that America is not really America anymore but some fear-and-loathing hellscape dreamed up by a delusional old man and his grasping billionaire henchmen.

Or to put it another way: We ain't exactly down these days with holding up lamps for the huddled masses. 

More likely the lamps are torches and come with a side of pitchforks, standard accessories for a mob driven buggy by the paranoid fantasies of the delusional old man. This is hardly an un-blazed path in our beloved nation, sadly; the arc of our history might eventually bend toward justice, but it has also bent far too often toward bigotry, ignorance and plain old jackbooted thuggery.

And so lately we've been revoking visas and green cards and disappearing their holders until hell won't have it -- do not pass go; do not collect due process. This is not happening, mind you, because the holders are all hardened criminals threatening your family and mine. Mostly they're tourists and students who came here from overseas to become doctors, scientists, researchers and the like, and who wound up being abducted in broad daylight, shoved into unmarked vans by masked men and shipped off to some gulag in El Salvador or the American south.

Their crime: Expressing opinions that displeased the delusional old man and his Regime. 

Or having the wrong tattoo. Or the wrong surname. Or signing the wrong editorial. You know, all the things that will get you in trouble in a (cough, cough) freedom-loving nation.

Still, it's gotten bad enough in this (cough, cough) freedom-loving nation that some foreign governments are warning their citizenry to stay away from us, because, well, you don't know if you'll come back. There's perhaps a bit of over-the-top performance art in these warnings, but then again perhaps not.

Which gets us back to Mr. Rothschild's question: Why would any foreign athlete or visitor want to come to a place that's become so demonstrably inhospitable to foreigners? 

The aforementioned obvious answer is they wouldn't. In fact, how many of the participants might just to decide to boycott the World Cup or Olympics altogether? 

"Oh, that's just silly, Mr. Blob," you're saying now. "We've not gone so far down the paranoia rabbit hole that we'd whisk some Iranian wrestler or Venezuelan fencer off to Stalag 17 for waving his country's flag in a threatening manner. It would create a huge international incident, for one thing."

Fair point.

On the other hand, this assumes the delusional old man would behave rationally, a bet not even Vegas would take at this point. Besides, why would you think the old man and the rest of his America First crowd would care about an international incident? What in anything they've done these past ten weeks suggests they'd give a damn about what anyone else in the world thought? 

Detain some other country's athlete or fan? Why not?

If they don't like it, let 'em eat tariffs.

Torpedo this

I'm sure former University of Michigan prof Aaron Leanhardt knows more about physics than I would if I loved to be 200, but I think he's wrong, wrong, wrong. OK, so mostly wrong, then.

What Leanhardt said the other day about the torpedo bat, which he's credited with developing, is it's not his baby that's making baseballs jump out of the yard like scalded cats. It's the man wielding the thing.

"It's about the batter, not the bat," he says.

Yeah, well. I think it's about both.

I think the torpedo bat -- an odd-looking cudgel with the weight shifted toward the end, making it resemble either a bowling pin or, yes, a torpedo -- is like feeding steroids to your  Louisville Slugger. In other words, it's a performance-enhancer every bit as stat-skewing as the exotics with which players were shooting themselves up back at the turn of the century. 

I know, I know. This is codger-speak of the most flagrant sort.

But I say it after watching Aaron Judge and the New York Yankees make a joke of the game over the weekend, using the torpedo bat to mash 15 home runs in three wins over the Milwaukee Brewers -- including an astounding nine in one game. And I say it after Elly De La Cruz of the Reds, who surely doesn't need the help, used a torpedo bat to drive in seven runs the other night with a single, a double and a pair of dingers.

Mind you, this is not to ignore the fact baseball has devolved into a mash-or-nothing enterprise. That's the game now, and I get that. I also get there are practitioners of that game who can send rockets into orbit on the regular without the aid of enhanced weaponry.

And I also, also get it's not just baseball whose parameters change with the equipment of the times. In golf, for instance, Scottie Scheffler isn't exactly whacking gutta perchas around with a Harry Vardon mashie anymore. He's doing it with lab-engineered balls and composite drivers with clubheads the size of New Jersey. 

All of which has changed the game, and not necessarily for the good. More and more golf courses, it seems, are defenseless against better players with better training regimens and better sticks -- to the point where, at the Houston Open over the weekend, it took a closing 67 and a 20-under 72-hole score for Min Woo Lee to bring home the W.

Two of his pursuers, Gary Woodland and Sami Valimaki, shot 62s on Sunday. Scheffler carded a 63. Fourteen players shot 65 or better.

As for baseball ...

Well. I could see the torpedo bat -- plus the player wielding it -- turning the record books into kindling. Just as 300-yard drives in golf provoke more yawns than gasps these days, the torpedo bat could render the 60-homer season no big thing anymore. Or that could just be the codger-ly alarmist in me shouting at the kids on the lawn again.

What I do know is this: If the torpedo bat in the hands of an Aaron Judge or an Elly De La Cruz continues to be as absurdly deadly a weapon as it was in baseball's opening weekend, MLB might eventually have to weigh in. And, being MLB, however it does that will surely displease as many folks as it pleases.

Me? 

I just wish the torpedo bat had been around when I was a kid. Woulda made all my strikeouts much more impressive.

Century marks

 Today in this locale WOWO radio celebrates its 100th birthday, and again I'm in Vermont on a crystal clear winter's night, twirling the dial in the old late-model conveyance. Nine hundred spins past and then 1000 and then 1100, and right before 1200 comes up the voice of Bob Chase suddenly booms out at me from across the Green Mountains and 750 miles.

"AAAND HERE COMES WILLETT INTO THE ZONE ..."

Fort Wayne Komets hockey, by god. Chaser barking the play-by-play as if he were riding shotgun with me beneath a spray of stars flung like diamonds against the night sky.

That's what I think of when I think of WOWO, back when it was still those mighty 50,000 watts and went all across the eastern half of the nation.

People in North Carolina and Ontario and, yes, Vermont knew Bob Chase and Komet hockey, because of WOWO. Young girls danced barefoot on a West Virginia road to its music. The late great Atlanta Constitution columnist Lewis Grizzard even mentioned it obliquely in one of his pieces, writing about hearing a hockey game in Fort Wayne, In. one night.

If you knew nothing else about the Fort, you at least knew WOWO. It made the city far more recognizable within a far larger orbit than it ever would have been otherwise.

And now it's 100 years old, and God bless it. Went on the air in 1925, when the Klan ran Indiana and even its governor wore the sheet and hood. It was a dark time, and there were darker times ahead -- the crash of '29, the Great Depression that followed, two young black men hanging from a tree in Marion like Billie Holliday's strange fruit -- and then would come World War II and telegrams freighted with heartache arriving from places of which no one had ever heard: Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Iwo Jima, Bastogne.

WOWO was around for all of it. And of course much, much more.

If you grew up here and are of a certain age, WOWO was the voice of your mornings, especially when winter put its foot down and the snow piled up. That's when Bob Sievers would read off the school closings, either gladdening your heart or gently breaking the bad news that, yes, you'd best be headin' for the bus stop.

Jay Gould would be there with him, giving us the hog and soybean futures. Dugan Fry, too, later on. And of course Nancy Lee and the Hilltoppers would provide the musical accompaniment, singing endlessly about that Little Red Barn on a farm down in Indiana.

Now it's all these years later, a whole century of them, and so much is different, surprise, surprise. Bob Chase is gone and the Komets come to us from another station these days. The 50,000 watts are gone, too, WOWO having powered down a good space of years ago. And, like so many other AM entities across the last 30 or 40 years, it's become a megaphone for hard-right politics and the purveyors of same.

From Nancy Lee and the Hilltoppers to Joe Rogan and the like: Now there's a long and winding road for ya.

And yet ...

And yet, few threads run through this city's last 100 years the way WOWO 1190 AM does. Few trace memories of a particular time in this particular place are not informed by it. If it has reached the century mark of its existence, it has just as surely left a century of indelible marks on this city. Fort Wayne's tapestry would not be complete without it.

Nor would a certain long-ago night in Vermont, beneath those stars like diamonds.

Onesies

 And now a salute to chalk, on its special day.

Chalk is what you grew up with in elementary school, lying there in its little tray at the bottom of the blackboard. It's what you wrote math problems with in front of the whole class, and what you got them wrong with in front of the whole class. Chalk is what you had to break in half when it was new, or else it would send up an almighty squeak when you tried to write with it.

Chalk dust is what you banged out of the erasers when it was your turn to bang the erasers together. It's what turned your fingers white or yellow or green or blue. And it's what will be all over San Antonio next weekend, when the NCAA's Chalk Four convenes to decide who's best at putting a round ball through a round hoop.

"Wait, I thought it was the Final Four, not the Chalk Four," you're saying now.

Well, yes. And no. And on second thought (or third), yes, because it's actually both.

That's because all four No. 1 seeds are still standing in Da Tournament, which makes this the chalkiest March since 2008, the only other time the Final Four was an all-onesie party. March Madness? The hell is that? The only thing less mad than this March is the March of Dimes, or maybe a good old John Phillips Sousa march.

Here's how predictable (aka, boring) this has been: In two of the four Elite Eight games, all of which involved 1s, 2s and 3s seeding-wise, 1-seed Houston paved 2-seed Tennessee by 19 and 1-seed Duke washed 2-seed Alabama by 20. And in the third of the four games, 1-seed Auburn never trailed after jetting out to a 23-8 lead on 2-seed Michigan State, who eventually expired by six.

Only 3-seed Texas Tech kept the weekend from being a total sleep aid, leading 1-seed Florida by nine with 2:55 to play. But then Thomas Haugh bottomed a pair of threes and Walter Clayton Jr. scored eight points in the last 1:47, and the Gators survived, 84-79.

Now they'll get Auburn for the second time this season, while Duke faces Houston. The Blue Devils are the Final Four betting favorite, on account of their average margin of victory in Da Tournament so far is a nail-biting 23.4 points.

Speaking of, you know, boring.

Hopefully, Houston can beat that 23.4-point spread against the Dukies. Hopefully, Florida-Auburn replicates Florida-Texas Tech. 

Although the first time the two met this season, Florida won by nine. At Auburn.

Ah, well.

Whiff-o-rama

 Eternal verities don't get much more eternal, or much more, I don't know, verity-ish, than the ones that cling to baseball like Spanish moss on a southern oak. One of the most clingy, of course, is this: Baseball is its history.

The most American of our games lives it, breathes it, eats it. The game's caretakers have  celebrated it when convenient, and just as often papered over it when it wasn't. But baseball's history, and the mythology in which it frequently comes wrapped, has always defined its place in the national mosaic.

Which brings us, in the Blob's usual convoluted way, to Rafael Devers of the Boston Red Sox.

He's the Bosox' new DH, having moved there from third base to make room for Boston's prize offseason acquisition, Alex Bregman. And last night, he went hitless in four at-bats in a 4-3 loss to Texas, striking out three times.

The last is significant, because it means Rafael Devers is now a part of that unconquerable baseball history. Albeit not in a good way.

Those three strikeouts, see, were Devers' eighth, ninth and tenth of the infant season. That's 10 Ks in three games to start the campaign, making Devers the alltime Whiff-O-Rama king of early-season futility.

Prior to last night, no player in the history of the modern game had ever struck out 10 times in the first three games of the season. That goes back all the way to 1901, when the Boston Beaneaters were a thing. Cy Young was still pitching then. Ty Cobb was 15 years old and four years away from his major-league debut with the Tigers. Babe Ruth was just 6, but already raising so much hell his parents shipped him off to reform school a year later.

In other words, Devers' futility has some significant historic weight to it.

The strikeout record he broke, after all, was nine in three games, and in 124 years only five players had even done that. The latest were Jack Cust of the Rockies, Will Benson of the Reds and Brent Rooker of the A's, all in the last three years; the first were Wally Post of the Reds in 1956 and Greg Luzinski of the Phillies in 1974.

I wouldn't know the first three if they swung a bat at my head and missed. Post and Luzinski, though ... well, now you're talkin'.

Just for fun, and perhaps to give Devers a measure of comfort, I looked up what Post and Luzinski went on to do in those two signature years. I suspected they weren't as awful as those first three games suggested, and I was right.

Luzinski, it turns out, played in just 85 games but batted .272 with seven homers and 48 RBI. He struck out 76 times, less than one whiff per game.

And Post?

Well, Wally batted .248 with 36 jacks and 83 ribbies. He struck out 124 times in 143 games, which works out to 0.86 per game.

Not a bad year, all in all. And perhaps an encouraging sign to Red Sox fans that Devers' current funk won't last forever.

Of course, if it does, Red Sox management could always fire up the time machine and ship back to the 1901 Beaneaters. What a fate that would be.

No cigar, but ...

 Almost.

Now there's a cheap word for you, on this morning after.

Most unsatisfying word in the English language, if you think about it. "Almost" means you didn't quite make it. It means you were brave in the attempt, but only in the attempt. It's a remainder-bin word, a discount word, a half-price-everything-for-a-buck-buck-buck word.

Or to use it in a sentence: Purdue almost reached the Elite Eight last night.

Almost knocked off 1-seed Houston. Almost became the party crasher in an NCAA tournament gone strictly chalk. Almost surprised even its fan base, which was not really expecting their Boilermakers to make it past last night or even beat the eight-point-or-so spread.

Instead, it took one superb inbounds play to beat them, 62-60.

By one skinny second. 

Because one eyeblink grab at the basketball could not ... quite ... grasp.

Almost.

Heck of a word. And a noble one, in this particular case.

Noble, because Houston was simply a better team, just as everyone knew it was, and with eight minutes to play the Cougars were in their rightful place. They were ten points clear of the Boilers and headed for more. They were knocking down the threes, Windexing the glass, gobbling up second-chance points.

Purdue, meanwhile?

Struggling. 

Missing more than making. Getting outrebounded 16-7 on the offensive end. Doing what a 4-seed is expected to do against a 1-seed.

And then ...

And then, Purdue became what Purdue has always been: A team you're not going to get away from without a few claw marks.

From 7:59 in the second half, when Houston led 56-46, the Cougars scored six points the rest of the way. Six ... points. And the last two didn't happen until 0.9 seconds were left on the clock.

They got it on that aforementioned inbounds play, when Milos Uzan fed Joseph Tuggle in paint and immediately stepped beneath the basket. Tuggle just as immediately fired the ball back to him, and Uzan eased in the layup to give Houston a 62-60 win.

The play was set up with 2.8 seconds remaining, when Cam Heide got his hands on an Uzan miss but couldn't quite close his mitts around the ball. Instead it slipped out of bounds off his fingers, and there went the overtime that should have been.

Almost.

Or, close but no cigar.

Or ... whatever.

Choose your appropriate metaphor, but remember it doesn't just describe being brave in the attempt. Remember those last eight minutes, when Purdue outscored Houston 14-6, held the Cougars without a field goal until Uzan's game-winning layup, harassed them into 0-for-11 shooting across 7:58 of the final 7:59.

That was Purdue being Purdue, in every best sense of that phrase. It was Purdue going out on its feet because ... well, because it's just what the Boilers tend to do.

And that cheap remainder-bin word, "almost"?

Not quite so cheap, this time around.

Form-fitting

 I don't know what's going to happen to tonight in the remaining four Sweet Sixteen basketball games. But I do know Norm in accounting ain't happy right now.

Norm in accounting, see, is the guy who picked a lot of upsets in his office NCAA pool. His bracket's tuna surprise right now, and he's even gonna lose to Carl in group sales, who thinks his poop don't stink because he landed that big farm implement account and is still telling everyone aaallll about it months later.

Now he'll have this to strut around about, too.

That's because the first four Elite Eight teams are in the corral, and none of them is Florida Atlantic or even 10-seed Arkansas, the last not-really-Cinderella-but-they'll-do left in Da Tournament. The Razorbacks had a 16-point lead on 3-seed Texas Tech at one point last night the Red Raiders made it disappear in a stirring comeback and dispatched the Hogs 85-83 in overtime.

They'll play in 1-seed Florida, an 87-71 winner over Maryland, for the West Region title tomorrow.

Meanwhile, it'll be 1-seed Duke vs. 2-seed Alabama in the East Region final, after both teams cracked 100 points to knock out Arizona and BYU, respectively. The Blue Devils won by seven, 100-93; 'Bama made an astounding 25 threes to wash BYU by 25, 113-88.

So it'll be a 1 vs. a 3 in one Elite Eight matchup, and a 1 vs. a 2 in the other.

Borrring. And also, not a good sign for your Purdue Boilermakers, Ole Miss Rebels, Michigan Wolverines or Kentucky Wildcats tonight.

4-seed Purdue gets 1-seed Houston in the Midwest, another form-fitting matchup. 5-seed Michigan faces 1-seed Auburn in the South. The 6-seed Rebels take on Michigan State vs. 6-seed Ole Miss in the other South Region game, and the 3-seed Wildcats play 2-seed SEC nemesis Tennessee in the other Midwest Region game.

The good news for UK: Big Blue has already beaten the Volunteers twice this season. The bad news: Beating a really good team a third time is really, really hard to do, or so goes the cherished old Sportsball article of faith.

So if the faith holds, and the form chart, it'll be a 2-seed against 1-seed in the Midwest Region Elite Eight, and a 2-seed against a 1-seed in the South Region.

More borrrring.

(Although the games likely won't be)

More Carl-from-group-sales lording it over poor Norm, going on and on about how you could tell this was going to be one of those reeeally chalky years if you were an astute observer of the college game -- which Carl is, by the way, and has been for a long time.

(Although Carl probably won't get all that out, because Norm likely will have decked him by then)

Hope sproings ...

 ... as opposed to "hope springs", because we're not havin' any of those usual Opening Day cliches.

Here at the Blob, see, we delight in turning traditional themes upside-down, so today there'll be no chatter about who's got a real shot at the World Series and who doesn't, and who will emerge to surprise and delight us as the weather warms. Will it be the Tigers? Will it be the Padres? Will it be the D-Backs or the Rays or the Blue Jays or the Royals, or maybe even the Chicago Bear Cubs, those annual dousers of hope?

Hell, I don't know. Didn't I just say we're not doing that here?

No, what we're focusing on instead is hope sproinging -- i.e., who will crush hope beneath the ruthless heel of pure awfulness, sending hope-parts flying everywhere. And, no, this does not mean another discourse on my Pittsburgh Cruds ("Thank God!" you're saying), who will likely be Cruddy again but have been eclipsed in Cruddiness by even more inept practitioners of the baseball arts.

Which is to say, let's talk that other team in Chicago, the White Sox.

Last season, you'll recall, the What Sox were the worst team in the history of the modern game, going 41-121 and finishing 53 games out of first in the American League Central. This means the winners of the Central, your Cleveland Guardians, beat them by almost a third of a season. In fact if the What Sox  had lost one more game or the Guardians had won one more, it would have exactly a third of a season.

But good news, What Sox fans, or fan!

The oddsmakers don't think that's going to happen again. Only, you know, almost.

The touts have the over-under for the What Sox at 53.5 wins, which would be 12.5 more a year ago. Twelve-and-a-half more Ws! Twelve-and-a-half more times when you'll be able to leave Guaranteed Rate Or Weight Or What-Have-You Field without saying, "That's the s****iest team I ever saw!"

OK, so you'll probably still say that. But at least you won't feel quite so lousy about it.

At any rate, even if 53.5 wins  is the lowest win total set by sportsbooks in more than 35 seasons (or so says ESPN Research), it's better than last year. Which means hope will still go sproing, but maybe not until tomorrow.

Today, Opening Day, the What Sox open at home against the Los Angeles Angels. The good news is the Angels were the second-worst team in the AL last season. The bad news is, at 63-99, they still finished 22 games ahead of the What Sox.

On the hill for the What Sox will be Sean Burke, a 25-year-old righthander from Sutton, Mass. The good news is he went 2-0 with a 1.42 ERA as a rookie last summer, striking out 22 and walking just seven in 19 innings of work. The bad news is he had a 6.75 ERA in spring training this year.

First pitch is scheduled for 4:10 this afternoon. So, play ball.

Or whatever.

Things you just don't do

Once upon a time I saw a high school girls basketball coach get booed by a team he wasn't even playing.

Actually it was fans of that team, and it was at the state finals back in the single-class days. Those fans were there to cheer on the area team I happened to be covering that day, and which was playing in the second afternoon game. But the aforementioned male coach, and what he was doing, was not something they were willing to let go, no matter how casually invested they were in a game that didn't involve their girls.

What this coach was doing, see, was manhandling his players.

Grabbed at least one of them by the arm as she came out of the game. Shoved her down on the bench. Did something similar several times to several other players.

"That's terrible!" the area fans shouted.

And also: "Get your hands off her!" 

And also various and sundry other boos, catcalls and expressions of look-at-this-jerk outrage.

I'm remembering all this (best that I can after so many years) because of something that happened in upstate New York the other day.

It also happened in a state finals game, and it also involved a male coach. His name is Jim Zullo, and he's 81 years old and in the state's Hall of Fame. His team, Northville High School, had just lost. And one of his players, Hailey Monroe, was crying, as kids will do when they're in high school and every bad day feels like the worst day in the history of the world.

Zullo apparently either didn't understand that, or didn't like to see it. So he stepped behind Monroe and yanked her ponytail so hard it pulled her head back and prompted a teammate to get up in Coach's grill, presumably telling him not to do that.

As ever in a time when everything eventually winds up on video, there is of course video. Here it is.

The upshot was swift. Zullo was immediately fired, and almost as immediately got up in front of the microphones and minicams to publicly apologize to Monroe and everyone else involved. Said a coach should never, ever put his hands on one of his players, and if he could take back the moment when he did, he'd do it in a heartbeat. But he couldn't, and he accepted the consequences.

Me?

I think the guy is absolutely right.

I think you don't get to be a Hall of Fame coach without knowing where the boundaries are, and without knowing when you've crossed them. And recognizing that when you do, you get what you get -- no matter how momentary the lapse.

All those years back, a certain fan base at a certain girls state finals game understood that. But you know who didn't?

The coach they were booing. 

And his administration, because as far as I know Coach remained the coach.

And at least one of his colleagues at the scorer's table, who turned around, glared at that certain fan base and said something along the lines of,  "They don't get it." 

Sorry, buddy. But you're the one who didn't get it.

Off schedule

 Stepped outside this morning as daylight came up like a theater curtain, and I could see my breath. The air was fleece-over-flannel-shirt chilly, and a thin layer of frost tinged the  brown March grass a sort of off-white.

Didn't feel like spring, in other words. Even if the birds were already up and trilling to beat the band. 

And yet ...

And yet, Opening Day, boys and girls!

The crack of a bat. The hum of the crowd. The bray of an umpire's full-throated call ("Steee-RIKE!");  the heady perfume of popping corn and 'dogs on the rotisserie; a whisper of breeze taking the edge off the sun hot on your ne-

I'm sorry, what?

You mean today is NOT Opening Day?

You mean it's not 'til TOMORROW?

You mean I have to wait one more whole day before Paul Skenes takes the hill for my Pittsburgh Cruds against the sorry-ass Miami Marlins, and the Cruds' quest for 162-0 officially begins?

But ... but that's CRAZY!

"No," you're saying now. "That's baseball."

Which is maybe more adept at getting in its own way than any sport except IndyCar, which has turned getting in its own way into a growth industry. (A process that continued Sunday, when the IndyCar race at the Thermal Club course drew pathetic viewership in part because the Fox broadcast went off the air for 20 minutes and Thermal is, well, a horrible venue). 

Anyway ...

Anyway, baseball once again decided crazy was the way to go. Because if commissioner Rob Manfred and the gang weren't crazy, they would have scheduled Opening Day for today, and not for tomorrow.

When it will go head-to-head with the Sweet Sixteen.

Seriously, who does that? Who doesn't know that in March it's all about basketball, basketball, basketball? Who is so deaf to the thunder of Da Tournament that he or she looked at a calendar and failed to realize that March 27 was the first day of the Sweet Sixteen?

Scene from some boardroom somewhere, months ago:

"Well, guys, it's time to schedule Opening Day for next year. Whatta ya say? March 27 work for you?"

"Um, isn't that a Thursday, boss?"

"Yeah. So?"

"Um, isn't the NCAA basketball tournament going on then?"

"Yeah. Again, so?"

"Well, um, I'm looking at the tournament calendar here, and according to this, the Sweet Sixteen falls on March 27 and 28. Which means it'll be wall-to-wall buckets and bracketeering those two days. If we want Opening Day to be Opening Day -- you know, an event -- shouldn't we think about making it the 26th? Beat the crowd, so to speak?"

(Long pause)

"Ah, it'll be fine. Not everyone watches that thing. Heck, when's the last time we had an NCAA tournament office pool?"

(Long pause)

(Longer pause)

(Guy who won last year's pool clears his throat)

"Ummm ..."

No Littles need apply

 Connective tissue is everywhere if you know where to look for it. Call that your home truth for today.

The tie that binds in this case stretches all the way from Fort Wayne, In., to the NCAA Sweet Sixteen, and not because the local mid-major is playing in the latter. It's not. On the contrary, the local mid-major's best player entered the transfer portal yesterday, and he's a hometown guy to boot. 

"What's that got to do with Da Tournament, Mr. Blob?" you're undoubtedly saying now.

I'm getting to that.

See, in the same week Jalen Jackson from Northrop High School and Purdue-Fort Wayne of the Horizon League presumably lit out for presumably greener pastures, Da Tournament bid farewell to its mid-majors, too. There isn't a single MAC or Horizon or SoCon or Ivy school remaining. Everyone left standing is from one of the four high-dollar conferences.

The Big Ten, the SEC, the ACC and the Big 12. That's it. That's your Sweet Sixteen field. All the major food groups are represented, as Judd Nelson observed of Michael Anthony Hall's lunch in "The Breakfast Club." 

What this has to do with Jalen Jackson entering the transfer portal after averaging just shy of 20 points per game for PFW this season may not be immediately obvious, mainly because I have no idea what went into the young man's decision. What I do know is he's already getting inquiries from a pile of major-league schools, as talented backcourt players always do.

And should he land at one of those major-league schools?

Well, he'll be following exactly the trajectory of a lot of mid-major players before him. And it's the transfer portal and NIL that have smoothed their path. 

Now, this does not mean I'm ready to say the aforementioned have turned the Littles into little more than a farm system for the Bigs. That would be premature, because the trend isn't yet that formulaic. And the truth is, players leave programs for more reasons than wheat has chaff.

However.

However, the portal and NIL certainly have changed the dynamic between the Littles and the Bigs, and not in a good way. The priorities of each used to have at least some connective tissue of their own; now there is none. The Littles still for the most part see athletics as an integrated part of the larger institutional whole. The Bigs treat the institutional whole as a mere brand for the corporate interests of Athletics Inc.

Thus, the gap widens. Thus, we edge closer and closer to the day when the Littles will be nothing more than a farm system for the Bigs, with the portal and NIL providing the essential framework for that system.

In the meantime, welcome to a Sweet Sixteen in which no Littles need apply.

No Catamounts of Vermont, dammit. No Yale or Harvard or Princeton. No Florida Atlantic, no Florida Gulf Coast, no Creighton or George Mason or College of Charleston or even Gonzaga.

No glass slippers, Dancin' their Cinderella way into the second weekend.

Fairy Tales Are For Losers: Now there's a marketing slogan for you.

Not.

First weekend thoughts

 And now Da Tournament -- the Dance, the Madness, the Big Show -- advances to the Sweet Sixteen, and what have we learned so far, class? What great truths were revealed, or at least reinforced, by all those misses, makes, rebounds, turnovers, goaltends, fouls and should-have-been-fouls?

A few thoughts, random and otherwise ...

* Traveling? We don't need no stinking traveling.

Or at least not at the end of Maryland-Colorado State, when the Terrapins avoided a 12-4 upset thanks to Derik Queen's last-second Samsonite act. Which is to say, he beat the buzzer to hand the Terps a 72-71 win, but he also traveled like Marco Polo on the play and got away with it.

Codger Nation immediately raised hell. The Blob, also a codger but an occasionally contrarian one, did not. That's because, let's face it, traveling went out with laces on the basketball. It's been only a sporadic concept since the rulemakers decided the Euro step was a legit basketball move and not what it actually is, which is traveling with a fake ID.

* Dan Hurley continues to be the most annoying man in basketball.

This after the UConn coach pissed and moaned like usual after his two-time defending national champion UConn Huskies were eliminated by 1-seed Florida, which got its board shorts scared off it by Hurley's bunch before surviving 69-67.

The champs went out on their feet, in other words. Hurley, being Hurley, went out telling Baylor -- up next at their site against Duke, another No. 1 seed -- he hoped the Bears didn't get (bleeped) the way Hurley's team got (bleeped).

Very nice.

Or to paraphrase what Winston Churchill said about Bernard Montgomery: Insufferable in victory, even more insufferable in defeat.

* Kelvin Sampson earns some flowers.

And, OK, I know what you're going to say: "Kelvin Sampson? You mean the guy who blew up IU's program in just a couple short years? That Kelvin Sampson?"

Yes. That Kelvin Sampson.

Whose 1-seed Houston Cougars got past 8-seed Gonzaga to advance to the Sweet Sixteen, but not before the Bulldogs were as tough an out as everyone expected them to be. Sampson acknowledged as much on national TV, saying everyone should take a moment to salute the 'Dogs.

"Let's stop and congratulate Mark Few and Gonzaga," Sampson said. "For what they've accomplished ... they've been such a shining light for basketball programs and basketball coaches for a long, long time. There's nobody I respect more than Mark Few, and there's not a basketball program I respect more than Gonzaga."

Sampson said all this after Houston escaped the Bulldogs 81-76, and after Sampson consoled Gonzaga redshirt senior Khalif Battle in the handshake line. In likely his last college game, Battle missed a 3-pointer with 14 seconds left that would have tied it, and he was in tears when Sampson approached him, eschewed the handshake and instead threw his arms around him.

Whatever else you want to say, think or believe about Kelvin Sampson, that was pure quality. 

* Purdue? Still Purdue-in'.

You know the story here, if your blood runs black-and-gold: The Boilermakers entered the Madness as one of the more perplexing teams in the show, a team that ascended to the top of the Big Ten in January and then lost six of its last nine games. Got washed by 18 from the Big Ten tournament by Michigan, a team the Boilers had ball-peened by 27 six weeks before. 

Drew a shaky 4-seed in Da Tournament, immediately making them a sexy upset pick against a 29-win High Point team in the first round.

Uh, no.

Instead, the Purdues wore down High Point late to win by 12. Then they routed McNeese State, a 12-5 winner over Clemson in the first round, in a 14-point win that was never that close. The Boilers fled the scene from the outset, going up 27-11 and 36-14 in the first half, then building the lead to 26 in the second before taking their foot off the gas. 

In both games they departed from their usual script, pounding it inside to Trey Kaufman-Renn and outrebounding High Point 45-24 and McNeese 41-24.

That's a combined 86-48 ass-whuppin' on the glass if you're keeping score at home.

Now?

Now the Boilers get Houston late Friday night, which is likely when the clock both literally and figuratively strikes midnight for them. Or not. At this point, who knows with the black-and-gold?

* And the Conflicted Bowl goes to ... Arkansas and John Calipari.

Who ushered Rick Pitino and 2-seed St, John's to the sidelines in one of the weekend's hardest-fought, if ugliest, games. The Razorbacks, a 21-13 10-seed coming in, shot a respectable 42.9 percent but were just 2-19 from the 3-point arc. The 27-4 Red Storm, on the other hand, went down in a storm of bricks, shooting 28 percent (21-of-75) and clanking 20-of-22 from Threeville.

The Big East player of the year, RJ Luis Jr., set the tone for all that, going a horrendous 3-of-17 and looking so lost down the stretch Pitino benched him for the last five minutes as the Hogs pulled away to a nine-point win. 

So off Calipari and his underHogs go to the Sweet Sixteen, while Pitino's stellar season abruptly ends. And why was this the Conflicted Bowl, you ask?

Well, because it was Calipari vs. Pitino, of course. Two guys a lot of hoops fans consider dirty because of past indiscretions.

The Blob's position on this is Pitino is and always has been the far more skeevy of the two. Partly this is personal bias -- in my 38 years as a sports scribe, Pitino is the only person I know for sure lied to my face -- but part of it is the record, too.

Pitino, after all, oversaw a Louisville program that was rotten to the core. Calipari, on the other hand, is decades removed from a player-payola scam at UMass, and the only apparent thing he did wrong at Memphis (along with Indiana and several others) was recruit Derrick Rose -- who was subsequently accused of having someone take the SAT for him in high school, causing the NCAA to invalidate an entire Memphis season.

After which Calipari went to Kentucky, where in 15 seasons he never ran afoul of the NCAA.

So I guess, in the Conflicted Bowl, the good guy won. Or the better guy at least.

An example spurned

 I don't know what heavenly mansion Jackie Robinson calls home these days, but I bet he's stomping around it cussing up a storm right now. Or maybe just sighing at the way some things never change.

This after the Department of Defense (Motto: "Keeping History As White As Possible") disappeared Jackie's military service from its website. It did this during its purge of, among others, the Tuskegee Airmen, the Navajo code-talkers, Colin Powell, Pima flag-raiser Ira Hayes and ... oh, heck, just about anyone of darker pigmentation who contributed greatly to our proud military tradition.

Seems this targeted erasing of Certain Kinds Of History was part of our new Regime's war on diversity, equity and inclusion, values which used to represent the best of the American experiment but now are viewed with revulsion by the Regime. That the Regime's sneak attack on Jackie and the others failed miserably -- all the aforementioned groups/individuals have since been restored -- proves that, at least for now, the experiment yet survives.

In other words, all kinds of decent Americans were all kinds of royally pissed, and let the Regime know about it. And as the disappeared hurriedly reappeared (with the dubious explanation that it was all a "mistake"), you could almost see the thought bubble appear above Regime leader Donald Trump's head: "Dammit! We couldn't slip it past 'em!"

But back to Jackie, and also to Major League Baseball.

Which makes a huge deal every spring on April 15, the day in 1947 when Jackie broke the color line and the American Pastime finally became truly American. Every player on every team wears Jackie's No. 42 on that day. His sublime courage and refusal to break in the face of often virulent racism are duly noted. Forced to back down that first season, he never did so again.

This was always part of Robinson's DNA, and, significantly, the military service the Regime tried to erase revealed as much. From Andscape contributor Justin Tinsley: "In 1944, Robinson was court-martialed for refusing to give up his seat and move to the back of an Army bus. He was acquitted and later received an honorable discharge that same year."

So the courage and conviction of 1947 were always there.

Not so much for MLB, unfortunately.

It talks a good game in honoring Jackie every year, but his example seems lost on it otherwise. This week, the news broke that Major League Baseball removed all references to "diversity" from its careers website, an obvious surrender to the Regime's DEI obsession. It then compounded this supreme act of cowardice with an official statement so vacuous it practically echoed.

"Our values on diversity remain unchanged," the statement read, with unintentional hilarity. "We are in the process of evaluating our programs for any modifications to eligibility criteria that are needed to ensure our programs are compliant with federal law as they continue forward."

Imagine Jackie Robinson mouthing such fluff back in 1947. Or on that bus in 1944.

"Boy, you gotta move to the back of the bus."

"Give me a second. First I have to evaluate my actions to ensure they are compliant with federal law as I continue forward."

Jackie Robinson would never have said such a thing. Jackie Robinson would have told the Regime to go to hell.

Something MLB would do well to think about. Especially on April 15, when its words will now ring especially hollow.

A man in full

 George Foreman was the patron saint of codgers, once upon a time.

He was the almost 46-year-old who climbed back in the ring more than a decade after he left it to knock out Michael Moorer, a mere pup of 26. Whipped the whippersnapper, old George did. Won one last championship belt for doing it. Proved once and for all that you can teach an old dog new tricks, provided one of them is a lethal sledgehammer hook.

"The older we get, the better we were"? Phooey on that. The older we get, the better we are.

That was George Foreman.

He was the kindly man-mountain who sold you the George Foreman Grill on your TV -- just look at all that icky grease drain away! -- and the loving father who named all his sons George. He was the angry young thug saved from Houston's uglier quarters, and likely from prison, by the ring. He was the All-American kid who waved a tiny stars-and-stripes after winning gold in Mexico City ... the scowling engine of destruction who put another engine of destruction, Joe Frazier, on the canvas six times in a 1973 bout ... the unwitting dupe bewitched by Muhammad Ali's rope-a-dope a year later.

He was a bully. A menace. A mean, frightening young man who found God and became a gentle, smiling teddy bear who sold kitchen appliances and wouldn't hurt a fly unless his name was Michael Moorer.

If a man's life can be objectified, then George Foreman's was a kaleidoscope: The sum of uncounted disparate parts somehow adding up to a man in full.

He left us yesterday at 76, too soon by the way we judge the passing of good men, and all of boxing mourned.  It wasn't just that he was one of the most formidable boxers of all time, with a 76-5 record, 68 knockouts and eight alphabet-soup heavyweight titles. It was that he became so beloved after all that, and yet another lesson in both the redemptive power of faith and the leavening of years.

So long, Big George. Rest well in the peace you were blessed to find, and with which you made us all smile.

Chalkin' it up

 Send a bouquet to your McNeese State Cowboys this a.m., on account of they saved America from the complete absence of lovely chaos yesterday. Woulda been sheer Dullsville without 'em.

This is because the Cowboys got to the finish line ahead of Clemson on the first day of the NCAA Tournament, meaning Da Tournament scored its requisite 12-over-5 upset right off the hop. It also redeemed, sort of, a chalky day of disappointing adherence to form and heavyweight-flexing snoozers.

Houston, one of the four 1-seeds, led the latter by mashing16-seed SIU-Edwardsville by 38. Auburn, another of the 1-seeds, narrowly escaped another of the 16-seeds, Alabama State, by 20. No. 2 seed St. John's erased Omaha by 30 to avoid the 15-over-2 upset; another 2-seed, Tennessee dismissed Wofford by 15; 3-seed Wisconsin Big Sky-ed Montana by 19.

Heck. Even Purdue, a favorite of bracketeers to succumb to first-round Madness, refused to go off script.

 The Boilermakers have lost in the first round to double-digit seeds two of the last three years -- two years ago they became only the second 1-seed in tournament history to lose to a 16-seed, Fairleigh Dickinson -- but  this time, nah. A 29-win High Point team hung around and hung around, but Purdue used its Big Ten size, strength and depth to pull away late and win by a dozen, 75-63.

On another day when the 4-seed Boilers bricked it up from the 3-point arc (5 of 15), they paint-balled the Panthers into a coma, outrebounding them 45-24 and outscoring them 20-8 on second-chance points. Trey Kaufman-Renn led the charge with 21 points and eight boards; Cam Heide put up a double-double (11 and 10) off the bench; and point guard Braden Smith finished with 20 points, six assists, three rebounds and two steals despite sputter-y 6-of-19 shooting.

Now Purdue gets McNeese to go to the Sweet Sixteen, and, hey, let's talk some more about those Cowboys.  A 28-win team facing a 27-win ACC school should have meant see-ya-later, but McNeese held the Clemsons to 13 points in the first half, led by an astounding 18 at the break, and needed every bit of it to survive a frantic second-half comeback by the Tigers.

The final was 69-67, and Clemson alums will argue all day that if the game had lasted 41 minutes, their guys would have upheld the form chart and made it an even duller Day 1. Unfortunately for them, the college basketball rules are pretty clear on the matter: Only 40 minutes need apply, excepting ties.

"But Mr. Blob," you're saying now. "What about 11-seed Drake knocking out 6-seed Missouri by 10? Doesn't that count as lovely chaos? Ditto 9-seed Creighton blowing out 8-seed Louisville, whom everyone thought was criminally under-seeded?"

Sorry, no dice. Drake came in 31-3, so beating a 12-loss Missouri squad by 10 hardly qualifies as chaos, lovely or otherwise. Creighton blackjacking Lull-ville by 14 comes closer, but, come on, it's still just a 9 beating an 8. Robins in spring are rarer.

Today?

Well, lovely chaos is still waiting for its curtain call. Cross your fingers.

Rabbit hole

 You don't have to tell sane people we live in a country these days that's lost its damn mind. All you have to do is doomscroll social media to understand the Tinfoil Hat Brigade has breached the ramparts and is loose in the courtyard, swinging wildly at transgenders or Canadians or some other menacing phantom.

Deport 'em all, every one of them. Throw 'em down a Salvadoran hole along with all those Venezuelan-Haitian gangster/rapist/Tyson-chicken-plant workers, or diverse equitable inclusion-ers, or anyone with a green card who expresses an opinion the Regime deems unacceptable. 

Which is to say, the kooks are driving the bus now. Yahoo.

This apparently is also true down in West Virginia, where folks are mighty angry at Mountaineers basketball coach Darian DeVries for scamming them into believing he thought Morgantown was almost heaven. Silly them. How were they to know he actually meant Bloomington, In.?

That's where DeVries is now, as the new head coach at Indiana University. Turns out Morgantown was just where he changed planes, because one year after he plighted his troth to the Mountaineers, the Hoosiers called and he came running.

This of course has sent some West Virginia loyalists down the conspiracy rabbit hole, America being the half-mad cauldron of paranoia it's become. DeVries lighting out for Indiana, according to this crowd, was a setup deal all along. It was in the works as far back as the beginning of this season, the narrative goes. And the injury to his son Tucker, a 6-7 guard of some repute?

Totally bogus, say the rabbit-holers. You think it's a coincidence, they say, that he got "hurt" right after Mike Woodson announced he was stepping down at IU? When the only way Tucker could get another season of eligibility and follow his dad to IU was with a medical redshirt?

Why, some of  the fringe-iest of the fringe element even say Indiana asked the NCAA tournament selection committee leave the Hoosiers out, because if Woodson made a deep valedictory run it would mess up the clean passing of the torch AD Scott Dolson and Co. had been planning since -- again -- the first of this season. Or, hell, maybe since last summer for all anyone in Morgantown knows.

Me?

I'm still wondering how Jim West always had exactly what he needed in the heel of his boot in "The Wild, Wild West." But that's just me.

The new guy

 So, then: Darian DeVries.

"Who?" you're saying now.

Haha. Very funny. Or not, I don't know.

Or not, because, OK, the new guy about to be dropped into the vat of boiling oil that is the Indiana  University basketball job is not the sexy hire. He is not your name guy, your marquee guy, your Bruce Pearl or Chris Beard or Brad Stevens ("Brad Stevens!" breathes Candy Stripe Nation, genuflecting), or anyone else who wasn't going to come to Bloomington no matter how often people tossed their names around.

Darian DeVries?

This is Archie Miller all over again.

OK, so no. Or probably not. Or, you know, just name-recognition-wise.

Who he is, you're tempted to say, is just another guy whose team didn't make Da Tournament, but that's just mean. First of all, West Virginia should have gotten in. They went 19-13 in DeVries first season after he inherited the 9-23 crash site left behind by the whole Bob Huggins drama. They finished just .500 in the Big 12 (10-10), but this season they beat Kansas and they beat Iowa State and they beat Gonzaga and Arizona -- all of whom did make the big show. 

So there's that.

There's also this: He's only 49, but he's been doing this awhile.

He served 17 years as an assistant under the tutelage of Dana Altman and Greg McDermott at Creighton -- two guys you have heard of -- and then got the big chair at Drake. Took over a stubbornly beige program that had won 20 games just once in 47 years, and wrung 20-win seasons out of it six years in a row. Last season the Bulldogs won 28 games, tying a school record, and made Da Tournament for the second year in a row as a 10-seed.

In the end, DeVries left Drake having won 150 games in six seasons, losing just 15 games across the last two. He'll likely come to Bloomington with his son, 6-7 guard Tucker DeVries, who was the linchpin of those Drake teams and might be the best player on the Indiana squad at least until all the transfer portal dust settles.

So, then: Darian DeVries.

Pretty resume. Lots of time in the trenches. Knows how to negotiate the bizarre landscape of college buckets these days. Might give you pause because of the circumstances -- what kind of person pledges to rebuild a program and then says, oops, just kidding, Indiana job's open? -- but maybe that's just me. 

Bidness is bidness, as they say. I get it. And there's hardly any bidness like the college basketball bidness these days.

Darian DeVries?

Yeah, he's no name guy. But neither was another guy who came to Indiana from Army 55 years ago.

His name was Bob Knight.

"Who?" everyone said then.

Exactly.

So much winning

 The NCAA Tournament's play-in round begins tonight over in Dayton, and, beyond the international date line in Japan, the Cubs and Dodgers kinda-sorta opened the baseball season. This confirms that winter (maybe) is finally loosening its icy grip, or some similarly treadless cliche.

Another sign: Golf news!

No, not Rory McIlroy smoking J.J. Spaun in a playoff to win the Players Championship at TPC in Florida. That was small beer compared to the other big golf news.

Which was our Great and Powerful Oz, President Donald John "Legbreaker" Trump, announcing he had won yet another club championship at another of his own golf clubs.

This is an astonishing feat, because Donald John is almost 79 years old and says this club championship was his last, on account of he's sorta retiring from the fiercely competitive world of Trump club golf. It's also not astonishing, because -- as Donald John and various golfing partners who don't wish to be deported will tell you -- he's an amazingly gifted golfer.

I mean, just look at all the championships he's won at golf clubs he owns. How many championships? I don't know exactly, but, trust me, it's a lot.

And, please, don't even start with that whole "Of course he won, it's his club and who's gonna really try to beat him?" nonsense. He also doesn't cheat, no matter what Rick Reilly wrote in that nasty book chronicling all the times Donald John has cheated on the golf course.

(The book is titled "Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump." It's available on Amazon for $19.87 hardcover or $11.36 paperback)

Anyway, that's all fake news. Donald John won all those championships -- he says it's 18, so we'll go with that -- totally legit. This is not like Vladimir Putin playing hockey and scoring eight goals in a game because the opposing goalie didn't want to accidentally fall out of a high-rise window. It's also not like the Emperor Nero, who once changed the year of the Greek Olympic Games so he could enter as a competitor and win a bunch of events.

This is the same Nero, mind you, who also competed in a chariot race with six more horses than everyone else was allowed. Not being the Mario Andretti of chariot racers, he crashed. He was also declared the winner.

Donald John is not Nero. Donald John is bonafide, as Holly Hunter liked to say in "O Brother Where Art Thou?" He's also not insane like Nero was -- or at least not that insane. 

(Though I suppose there's still time)

Any-hoo, let us in the meantime celebrate his sheer golfing awesomeness. So much winning, as he likes to say. Let us also contemplate a day when  -- like he kinda-sorta did at Daytona this year -- he'll tell Doug Boles and Roger Penske he wants to drive the pace car for the Indianapolis 500.

The Speedway actually considered letting him do it back in 2012. The backlash was so immediate and severe they couldn't drop the idea fast enough.

Of course, Donald John was not our Great and Powerful Oz then. He was just a bumbling real estate mogul and cheesy B-list reality star.

He also wasn't nearly as accomplished a golfer as he suddenly became around, oh, 2016 or so. Some guys are just late bloomers, I guess.

The small time

 Time now to peruse your soon-to-be-ashy bracket, and also to decipher the great mysteries that lie within it -- like how Purdue wound up with a 4-seed after losing six of its last nine games, and why the bracket nerds suddenly think Indiana got snubbed after a fair number of them figured they were toast three days ago.

(A lot of this, it seems, stems from the fact North Carolina got in with a less-impressive resume and its athletic director, Bubba Cunningham, is chairman of the selection committee. Supposedly he recused himself when the Tar Heels were being evaluated. Supposedly.)

Anyway ...

Anyway, Purdue's a 4-seed in the Midwest and Michigan, which beat the Boilermakers twice and squashed them by 18 enroute to the Big Ten tournament title, is a 5-seed in the South. This means the Wolverines get the dreaded 12-5 matchup with the UC-San Diego Tritons, who are 30-4 and probably didn't win any of those 30 by accident.

Purdue?

Well, Purdue gets 13-seed High Point out of (where else) High Point, N.C., a Methodist school with an undergrad enrollment of 5,135. The Panthers are 29-5 and champions of the Big South Conference. Their school colors are purple and white, and their mascot is Prowler the Panther, which sounds vaguely skeevy if you think about it. 

Their two best players, on the other hand, are an interesting pair. One is Kezza Giff, a 6-2 guard from Paris. The other is Juslin Bodo Bodo, a 7-footer from Cameroon. If this were last season, Purdue could have countered with a Canadian, but Zach Edey does his thing with the Memphis Grizzlies now.

I don't know if Kezza, Juslin and the rest of the Panthers can hand Purdue a first-round shocker for the third time in four years. I doubt it. But if Braden Smith and Fletcher Loyer go a combined 2-of-13 from the 3-point arc again, all bets are off.

So who am I picking to win it all?

Come on, you know this isn't the part where I do that. This is the part where I pick my favorite teeny-tiny doesn't-have-a-prayer team to root for.

Gotta say, I'm sorely tempted to pick High Point. But if I did that, the vengeful spirit of my mother, a Purdue grad, would come down from heaven and force-feed me liver-and-onions or something similarly vile.

No one wants that. Especially me.

So, sorry,  Prowler, you creepy stalker you. High Point is out.

Instead, I'm going with ... the Wofford Terriers!

I mean, come on, what's scarier than a terrier? Yorkies run screaming from terriers. Shih-tzus, too. They're the fiercest of your small-to-mid-size dogs, to paraphrase what David Letterman, a Ball State Cardinals grad, once said about his alma mater's mascot.

Anyway, Wofford is another Methodist school, which is not why I like it (although I was raised Methodist). Why I like it is because it's got some age on it; it was founded 171 years ago, in 1854, in Spartanburg, S.C. That means it sent boys to the Civil War on the wrong side, and also that its endowment was for a time in money with Jefferson Davis' face on it. This did not prove to be a wise financial decision once the Confederacy fell.

Wofford is even smaller than High Point, with an undergrad enrollment of 1,800 as of 2020. Its best players are Corey Tripp, a 6-3 guard out of Medina, O., and Kyler Filwich, a 6-9 center from Winnipeg (another Canadian!) who shoots free throws underhand, like Rick Barry. The Terriers got in because they won the Southern Conference tournament after an underwhelming regular season in which they went 19-15 and finished sixth in the SoCon.

None of that matters now, though. They're in Da Tournament as a 15-seed, and Thursday at 6:50 p.m. they play 2-seed Tennessee in Lexington, Ky. They're almost certain to lose big, but, hey, you never know. Terriers, remember?

Fierce. Determined. Bite the living hell out of your ankles.

Chomp 'em, Terriers. Chomp 'em.

Major leaguers

 You might have missed it these past two days with all the college buckets and what-not going on, but something happened over in Japan that was the biggest to happen in Japan since Matthew Perry showed up in 1853 and introduced Western decadence to an insular society that was doing just fine without it.

("Please! Not more history!" you're saying now.)

What happened was, the Hanshin Tigers stole the World Series trophy and said "Ha! 'World Series', my ass! Look at this cheesy thing! Where'd you get it, Big Lots?"

OK, so they didn't do that.

What they did do is shut out the defending World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers (and their supposedly invincible GNP-of-Switzerland lineup) 3-0. This was after they shut out the Chicago Cubs, also 3-0, in game that saw the Cubs go without a baserunner until the sixth inning.

That makes the Tigers 2-0 against the National League with March just half over. It also, presumably, makes everyone else in the NL glad major league baseball doesn't yet allow Japanese teams to join their little club.

"Damn right!" the Mets, Phillies, Braves, Brewers, et al might presumably say. "We don't need them coming here to mess with our playoff dough!"

"Double damn right!" the Pirates, Rockies, Marlins, Nationals, et al might presumably chime in. "We don't need them coming here to embarrass us! We embarrass ourselves just fine without them!"

The Cubs and Dodgers didn't do that, exactly. But they did show, somewhat glaringly, that they couldn't hit Japanese League pitching -- or at least Hanshin Tigers pitching.

The Cubs went down easily to 20-year-old lefty Keito Mombetsu, who threw five perfect innings and struck out two before departing. He and four other pitchers allowed just three hits and fanned seven.

And the Dodgers?

Didn't manage a hit until the fifth inning against Hanshin starter Hiroto Saiki, who struck out Shohei Ohtani to start the game and fanned six more Dodgers before, like Mombetsu the day before, taking a seat after five innings. The Dodgers managed just two more hits and Daichi Ishii closed it out by catching James Outman looking with a 95-mph fastball.

So two games, 18 scoreless innings against the bigs for Hanshin.

Or, you know, against the littles, as the case may be.

Boiler down

 I have no earthly clue where your Purdue Boilermakers are going to wind up once the NCAA bracket wheel stops spinning tomorrow night. That's for the committee and the slide-rule boys to figure out.

I do know this, however: Since Matt Painter figured out some stuff back in January, everyone else seems to have figured out what Painter figured out.

This after Michigan took the Purdues apart like a cheap toy in the quarterfinals of the Big Ten tournament yesterday, winning 86-68 by doing what seemingly everyone has been doing against the Boilers for the last six weeks. The formula rarely varies: Take away the 3-point line, pound the ball inside where it's basically Trey Kaufman-Renn against the world, and keep Braden Smith from taking over the game. Voila.

The Wolverines did a lot of that yesterday, and it again left the Boiler Up crowd Boiler Down. On the offensive end, the primary Michigan bigs, Danny Wolf and Vlad Goldin, combined for 33 points, 19 rebounds and seven assists. And on the defensive end, they all but silenced Smith and Fletcher Loyer from the 3-point arc, where they missed 11 of their 13 tries.

Smith, the Big Ten's Player of the Year,  did what he does, recording 12 points, four rebounds and six assists. And TKR did what he could, scoring 24 points and grabbing nine boards a day after going for 30 and seven in a tougher-than-it-should-have-been 67-61 win over USC.

But Caleb Furst, whose insertion into the Purdue lineup helped ignite the Boilers' surge back in January, chipped in just four points, though he did work the glass for five offensive rebounds and seven total. Cam Heide, a pick-me-up off the bench when he's right, had almost as many fouls (2) as points (3). The only other bright spots were Gicarri Harris and Myles Colvin,who combined for 20 points and were 4-of-7 from the arc.

Which meant everyone else was 3-for-15. 

This is certainly not the endgame everyone foresaw back on Feb. 7, when the Boilers dismissed USC by 18 to briefly ascend to the top of the Big Ten. They were 19-5 overall then and 11-2 in conference; six of the 11 Ws were by double digits, including a 91-64 floor-waxing of Michigan in Mackey. Since Dec. 21, they'd lost just twice.

And then ...

And then they lost their next four, including a 15-point loss at Indiana in which the Hoosiers crushed them 48-21 in the second half. And now they're 3-6 in their last nine games heading into Da Tournament, which makes you wonder not just where they'll land but how long they'll stay there.

Is this a Sweet Sixteen team?

Maybe. 

Is this a team that could lose to, say, Wofford in the first round?

Also maybe.

That's where we are now.

Hoosier twilight

 And now, they wait.

They wait because Oregon made a push and they couldn't answer, and wasn't that their season in a nutshell? 

They wait because their shooting dried up and their designated 3-point maestro came up empty, and wasn't that the recipe for every "L" in this long strange season?

They wait, because Malik Reneau and Trey Galloway couldn't carry them alone. Because help, or at least enough of it, never came from Luke Goode or Oumar Ballo or Anthony Leal or Myles Rice.

They wait. And probably fruitlessly at this point.

They wait, these Indiana Hoosiers, because the Oregon Ducks beat them for the second time in two weeks yesterday in Indianapolis, and the Hoosiers' Big Ten tournament run was over before it began. One and done -- and likely done, period, if you catch the drift.

Final score yesterday was 72-59, and if Indiana hung around for awhile they couldn't hang long enough. It was 56-54 when Reneau horsed in a layup with 7:33 to play, and then it wasn't. Then it was 59-54 and 61-54 and 65-54, and finally, when Reneau finally made another layup, it was 65-56 with two minutes to play and the thing was gone.

Five-and-a-half minutes, the Hoosiers went without a point. Five-and-a-half minutes, enabling Oregon to outscore them 16-5 across that last 7:33, another late-game checkout in a continuing series for Indiana.

Reneau scored 19 points, again leading the Hoosiers off the bench. Galloway added 15, five rebounds and nine assists, and Mackenzie Mgbako scored a dozen. Other than that ...

Well, other than that, not much. Goode, whose sniping from the 3-point arc has cured a few ills for the Hoosiers, put up a horse collar: 0-for-5, 0-for-4 from distance. Everyone else seemed to follow suit; Indiana shot 36.2 percent (25 of 69) and missed 12 of their 16 tries from Arcville.

And now, they wait.

They wait for a Dance call that probably won't come now, according to the slide-rule boys who nerd out over brackets and such. Joe Lunardi, ESPN's resident bracket guru, says Indiana is now the first team out after North Carolina won again in the ACC tournament yesterday. We shall see.

In the meantime, now the Hoosiers ...

Well. You know.

A death in the family

 I was watching St. John's dispose of Butler yesterday when a friend sent me a news link. 

I was watching Rick Pitino coach -- the older he gets, the more he looks like Al Pacino playing Jimmy Hoffa in "The Irishman", ever notice that? -- and RJ Luis Jr. bottom threes. I was watching misses, and makes, and more misses and makes, and dumb passes and Einstein passes. It was everything America loves about college buckets in March, and never mind the chunky NIL deals and rampant transfer portaling that's made it all so damn mercenary these days.

I was watching the game John Feinstein, that blue-blood Dukie, loved and illuminated for us better than anyone.

A bit later, the news link popped up.

John Feinstein was dead.

Dead at 69, on the same day his column about Tom Izzo appeared in the Washington Post, with another glorious March awaiting his insight and his pen. The man had contacts in the game like few others, and his fame as a premier sports journalist was midwifed by it. And suddenly he was gone and March in an eyeblink was all different, because John Feinstein was no longer there to tell its stories.

I can't begin to tell you what a hole that leaves. And how much poorer will be our narratives from here on out.

What I can tell you is the famously prolific Feinstein wrote about golf and tennis and football and minor league baseball, but it was college basketball that was his home place. He wrote books about Da Tournament and the ACC and the Patriot League. He wrote about all your coaching geniuses. And of course he wrote the book most of America knows him by: "A Season On The Brink," in which he a deep dive inside Bob Knight's Indiana basketball program during a typically tumultuous year.

It was a seminal work in the genre, because not only was Feinstein granted virtually unprecedented access by college basketball's most notorious fire-breathing dragon, he was granted that access by a fire-breathing dragon who especially enjoyed flambe-ing the media. We were his punching bag, his foil, the butt of his jokes and the object of his disdain. 

And yet somehow John Feinstein, 29 going on 30 at the time, convinced Bob Knight to give him a pass key. The book he produced from it went to the top of the New York Times bestseller list -- a remarkably nuanced portrait, for one so young, that revealed Knight as much more than just a cartoon character who screamed and bullied and threw chairs and tantrums with equal facility,

Knight being Knight, he never saw the nuance, hating the book and feeling Feinstein betrayed him because it included more than few instances of Knight swearing. This seemed akin to Popeye getting upset because someone wrote about his spinach addiction, but Knight didn't talk to Feinstein for eight years after "Brink" came out.

Nonetheless, the book endures as a classic that propelled a young sportswriter into the stratosphere. I've read it several times over the years, and, as former sportswriter of far less repute, I never come away from it without a mixture of envy and awe. He wrote this when he was 30? Are you SERIOUS?

And now I open up a news link, as March's magic begins to spark again, and I see that he's gone. And it feels like a death in the family -- a presumptuous notion born of the fact we were the same age and saw a lot of the same history being made in real time across the years.

Only John Feinstein, however, captured it so well.

Cinderella, with regrets

You might have missed it in all the excitement surrounding, I don't know, the dawn of another day perhaps, but something happened in New Britain, Conn., the other night that  both makes March wonderful and makes it unfair.

What happened was, the Red Flash of St. Francis (Pa.) beat top-seeded Central Connecticut 46-43 to win the Northeast Conference tournament and the automatic NCAA Tournament berth that comes with it.

Yes, that's right, boys and girls. Tiny St. Francis (total enrollment: 1,962 students) from even tinier Loretto, Pa. (total population: 1,196) is goin' Dancin'. It's been 34 years since the last time the Red Flash made Da Tournament, and therefore the biggest to-do Loretto's seen since the birth of the Fleenor triplets jumped the population from 1,193.

(OK, OK. So I made up that last part.)

Anyway, this immediately makes the Red Flash the most Cinderella-y of Cinderellas, on account of they're -- let's not to sugarcoat it -- a terrible basketball team. They'll come into the Madness with a 16-17 record, and according to the boys at KenPom, which figures these things, they're the 310th-ranked Division I team in the nation. Out of 364.

And Central Connecticut?

Well, the Blue Devils are 25-7, and this season they were the best team in the NEC by a country mile. They'd won 14 games in a row coming into the tournament championship game, and they'd already beaten St. Francis twice by a combined 31 points.

But, hey, you never know at tournament time, right?

And so Central Connecticut -- playing on its home floor, by the way -- squared off against the Red Flash for a third time, and neither team could hit sand if they were trekking across the Sahara. St. Francis shot 31.7 percent (19 of 60). Central Connecticut shot 30.4 percent (17 of 56). And from the 3-point arc, the two teams were a combined 8 of 43.

That's 18.6 percent, for the mathematics impaired. You could blindfold a third-grader and spin him around three times, and he'd still beat that.

But again, that's tournament time, right?

Which means, yes, everyone will be rooting for St. Francis now, and what fun it will be. But it also means, regrettably, everyone outside New Britain will forget Central Connecticut ever existed.

And that's a damn shame.

It's also the biggest flaw in the best sports month of the year, because it is unfair. If you're a smaller school playing in a  mid-major-or-lower league, it doesn't matter how well you've played or how dominant you've been for four months. All that matters is what happens on one night in a largely superfluous (except monetarily) conference tournament.

Misplace your shooting eye on that one night, and you're done. Those 25 Ws you've piled up across a long season mean nothing. The resume you've built, your regular-season championship, nothing. You might as well not have played the season at all.

It's always been my biggest beef with conference tournaments as a whole, and I fully realize that makes me a cane-pounding consarn-it coot who still mourns the death of the set shot. Nonetheless, I've always come down on the side of the long haul as opposed to instant gratification. And I suppose I always will.

Problem is, I don't know how you close a barn door that's been open so long even the smell of the horse is gone. So I fall back on one of my least favorite hackney-isms: It is what it is.

And so, go, you Red Flash. Because, dammit, it is kinda wonderful.

A step away. Still.

 For a moment yesterday afternoon, maybe more than that, it was right there. A free throw splashed, and on the floor and in the stands and up in Fort Wayne, where it mattered to fewer people than it should have, they could feel it -- a hand gripping the elbow; a whisper in the ear; a promise made 24 years ago at last being kept.

And then ...

And then, it was gone.

Down on the Corteva Coliseum floor in Indianapolis, a young woman named Jenna Guyer bottomed a pair of threes, then drove hard to the tin for a layup, and the top-seeded Green Bay Phoenix led 60-53 in the Horizon League women's championship game. And the NCAA Tournament berth that was right there for the Purdue Fort Wayne women had instead brushed past them like a ghost.

Score with 2:56 to play in the third quarter, after Jordan Reid knocked down that free throw: PFW 51, Green Bay 50.

Score when the clock finally shed its final seconds: Green Bay 76, PFW 63.

That's a 26-12 Phoenix advantage across the last 12:56, if you're keeping score at home.

That's yet another year of falling short of that 24-year-old promise, made when then-IPFW  made the jump to Division I and the NCAA Tournament became an actual possibility for both men and women. Coming up on a quarter-century later, it remains one very hard step away, even as the women won 25 games and had their best season in school history.

But you know what?

Yesterday wasn't the first time the Mastodons got close enough to leave fingerprints.

First time it happened was 11 years ago, and it was weirdly, almost eerily, similar. PFW was still IPFW then, and still a member in good standing of the Summit League. The Mastodon men upset South Dakota State to get to the conference championship game that year, then cold-jumped top-seeded North Dakota State out of the gate in the title bout -- burying 5-of-10 from the 3-point arc in the first half to take a 35-27 lead into halftime.

But the Bison wouldn't stay dead.

 A run early in the second half got them back even, and, after 13 lead changes, a young man named Taylor Braun drove for a layup with 1:18 to play. That made it 56-55, North Dakota State, and the scoreboard would never tilt back to the Mastodons again.

It ended 60-57. IPFW, so hot early, made just two field goals across the final 10:10.

And yesterday?

Like the men in 2014, the PFW women smoked it from the arc in the first half, sticking 7-of-12 threes to reach halftime all even with Green Bay at 40-40. And, like the men in 2014, the women ran out of gas down the stretch, missing their first six shots of the fourth quarter and going 7:12 without a field goal.

Eleven years ago, two field goals in the last ten minutes.

Yesterday, no field goals for more than seven of the last ten minutes.

And -- ah, crap -- deja blues all over again. 

Meanwhile in Indianapolis, Part Deux ...

 So remember yesterday ("Vaguely," you're saying), when the Blob wondered what in the h-e-double-hockey-sticks the Indianapolis Colts were doing, and who they were going to bring in to fulfill their grand plan to scare, er, motivate Anthony Richardson into playing better?

Ask and ye shall receive ... Daniel Jones.

Whom the Colts yesterday signed to a one-year, $14-million deal, and who presumably will compete on an equal footing with AR for the starting quarterback job.

Daniel Jones, who fizzled in New York with the Giants. 

Daniel Jones, who was subsequently dumped by the aforementioned and spent the rest of last season as a five-alarm emergency backup for the Vikings.

I don't know. Maybe the Colts thought they were signing former franchise great Bert Jones. 

Or Mac Jones. Or Grandpa Jones. Or Parnelli Jones.

In any case, the Horseshoes have decided he's the guy to push AR to either greater heights or the waiver wire, and, listen, this might be a craftier move than you think. Because if you do think about it, Daniel Jones actually might be the perfect guy for his intended purpose, whatever the hell that is.

Based on his resume, he'll be good enough to make AR hear footsteps, but not good enough to steal his job.  And he'll presumably be pliant enough to go along with the scheme, because what choice does he have? It's not like there's a bull market out there for his services.

"But Mr. Blob," you're saying now. "What if it turns out he's clearly better than AR? What if he finds whatever mojo he had for awhile in New York and forces the Colts to make him their QB1, because not to would just make them look silly?"

Well ... then they're screwed.

Then they've got to admit they blew the Big Draft Pick back in 2023. Or they're condemned to yet another season of quarterback roulette.

Battle-scarred Colts fans know the drill: Daniel Jones looks great one week, or at least serviceable enough, and he's the guy. Then he detonates a stink bomb the next week, and AR's the guy. Then AR, I don't know, runs off the field midway through the snap count or something, and, well, you know, Daniel looked really good that one week, so we'll give him another shot.

On and on. To judgment's trump, apparently.

One more thing: If the nightmare scenario actually happens, and the Colts bail on AR, what happens then?

Jones, after all, is a one-season rental, and he was never intended to be more than that. So the Colts aren't going to sign him to a chunky long-term deal (although it's the Colts, so you never know). That means they're suddenly without a quarterback headed into next offseason -- or they hang onto AR, and they're right back to square one.

In which case, Parnelli is starting to look better and better. Just sayin'.

Meanwhile, in Indianapolis ...

Just as there are eternal verities kiting about in the universe, there are eternal mysteries, too. Things that make no sense at all to mere mortals, and for which there seem to be no satisfactory answers.

Like, for instance, does anyone actually still watch "Survivor" after 30-plus years? And if so, why?

Also, who did put the bomp in the bomp bah bomp bah bomp?

Also-also, what the heck are the Indianapolis Colts doing?

This is a question you could ask virtually any time at all in the last six years, and the answer would be "Who the heck knows?" Or, "Beats me." Or, "They're the Colts. If it made sense, they wouldn't be doing it."

Which brings us to this morning, and NFL free agency, and the quarterback carousel whirling so fast various Billy Bob Heisman Arms are being flung off  like Momma being thrown from the train (remember that classic?).

Sam Darnold just signed a $100 mill deal to play for the Seahawks. Geno Smith, his predecessor, is a Raider now. Justin Fields is a Jet; Zach Wilson is a Dolphin; and Matthew Stafford is staying put in L.A. after the Rams agreed to pay him the GNP of Liechtenstein.

Everyone's settling into their digs, in other words. And what of the Colts, who for some earthly reason declared not long ago it would be a brilliant idea to stage real competition for the starting quarterback job?

So far they've sat back and watched the potential Real Competition go everywhere but Indianapolis.

What's up with that?

I'll choose Answer No. 2 from the aforementioned list: Beats me.

First of all, you're got to wonder what Chris Ballard and Co. are thinking by publicly talking about competition at the most important position on an NFL team. Does this mean, after just two seasons, that they're edging toward bailing on their franchise pick, Anthony Richardson? Does it mean bringing in someone to "compete" for QB1, but who, ultimately, the Colts have no intention of starting ahead of Richardson?

And how does Richardson interpret all this, except to conclude the team that took him fourth in the 2023 NFL draft has already decided he's thisclose to being a bust? And what does that do to his standing in the locker room, which is already less than ideal?

Imagine the conversation among the Colts brainiacs ...

GM Chris Ballard: "OK, guys, so we're paying this 21-year-old kid to be the Man, but after an enormous sample size of 15 games in two seasons he's still not the Man. What should we do to help him out?"

Some random guy in the room: "I got it, Chief! How 'bout we manufacture a fake quarterback controversy? That'll toughen up AR, and just think what a calming effect it will have on the locker room!"

Some other random guy: "Why, that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard!"

Ballard: "First Random Guy, I love it. And Second Random Guy ... you're fired."

And then the Colts sit tight while the available quarterback pool keeps shrinking. Perhaps they're waiting on Aaron Rodgers, since bringing in washed senior citizens has paid off so handsomely in the recent past.

Aye-yi-yi.

Media Sustenance 101

 This just in today from the website Awful Announcing: Kim Mulkey cares about nutrition.

Seems Mulkey's LSU women had just lost to Texas in the SEC women's basketball tournament the other day, and she was up on the podium for the postgame media scrum when she spied something she either didn't approve of or was just joking about. Coin flip deal on that one.

In any case, Mulkey's eagle eye caught a reporter over in the media workroom noshing on mozzarella sticks. Now, perhaps Coach Kim was hungry. Perhaps, like Captain Queeg in "The Caine Mutiny", she wanted aaalll the mozzarella sticks. Inquiring minds will never know.

What they do know is Mulkey pointed in that direction and said, "Are those media over there, or are they just eatin'?"

And here the Blob interrupts our narrative for a brief tutorial. Call it Media Sustenance 101, or Sportswriters Gotta Eat, Too.

First of all: The mozzarella stick nosher was a reporter from Greenville, S.C. named Lulu Kesin. She covers South Carolina women's basketball. Her interest in the LSU-Texas game was therefore zero, which is why she wasn't actually in the postgame presser.

"Then how did Coach Kim see her?" you might be asking.

Well, it's because at big do's like a major conference tournament or the Big Tournament itself, the media is frequently housed in a large open space somewhere in the bowels of the  venue. That means the media work space is frequently located right next to the news conference room. And, given that it's all one big room, they're merely curtained off from one another.

So when Mulkey pointed, she was pointing into the media workroom through a space between the curtains. And so, yes, Kesin and likely other media members were eatin' while they hammered out their gamers or notes or fought comma wars over the phone with their editors.

"You mean they let the media eat at these things?" you're saying now. "What a sweet deal."

Well ... yes it is. Sometimes. Depends where you are and what's on the menu.

(Brief pressbox food tour, from my tour of duty as a scribe: The hot dogs and chili at Notre Dame Stadium were excellent. The hot dogs at Michigan Stadium, on the other hand, were Tubes O' Death. And you never wanted to miss Pork Day at Purdue, because the butterfly pork sandwiches were delish.)

Now, you might wonder if it's entirely ethical (or even safe) to feed a bunch of sportswriters, and that's a legit question. And the answer is it's mostly a matter of practicality and convenience. You go to a basketball tournament or a major college football game, you're there all day and sometimes a good chunk of the night. If you get peckish during that time -- and you will -- there aren't many good options.

Yeah, you could leave the pressbox to go stand in a concession line, but then you miss the Irish scoring on two pass interference penalties, a helmet-to-helmet hit and a sketchy ruling in the end zone. Or you spend the time you're supposed to be writing your halftime blog pursuing the wild North American bratwurst.

Or you can bring in your own food. Some of us do that.

Point is, when Kim Mulkey calls out some sportswriter eatin', she's not making the point (Lookit those pampered elites!) she might think she's making. The dirty secret is, we really don't care that much.

I mean, I never once heard any of my fellow ink-stained wretches indignantly cry, "Hot dogs again? Where the hell's the chateaubriand?"  Heck, for years and years, if you covered the Indianapolis 500, you had to scrounge your own food, and no one really fussed about it. Some of us have pangs of nostalgia for the Speedway's Track Dogs to this day.

Here's the thing, though: I never, ever -- not in 40 years -- saw a scribe inhaling a Track Dog while A.J. Foyt was in the Economaki Press Conference Room telling the assembled media why his car was a tub o' s***.  We do have standards, see.

Yeah, I know. And pigs can fly, right?

Rebound

 You know what you were thinking. Come on, 'fess up, it's not like you hadn't seen this movie before.

Hero needs a win to ease himself off the NCAA Tournament bubble.

Hero's at home, it's Senior Day, fickle old Assembly Hall is not only willing but literally starving to pour out its love.

Hero ... craps all over the occasion.

Falls behind early.  Can't hit the broad side of a championship banner, missing 21 of 30 shots in the first half. Trails an equally desperate (but severely average) Ohio State team 46-36 with  12:12 to play after Devin Royal flushes a 3-pointer.

It's the seventh three of the afternoon for the Buckeyes. And, yeah, you know what you were thinking.

Ah, geez. Here we go. Same old Hoosiers, sinking to the occasion again.

Sound about right?

Sure it does. But you know what didn't?

Indiana 66, Ohio State 60.

Indiana clawing its way back into it, throwing a blanket over the 3-point arc and shutting down the passing lanes on the defensive end. Getting two monster triples down the stretch, on Senior Day, from Trey Galloway, one of the senior-est of seniors. Outscoring Ohio State 30-14 the rest of the way, including a 12-0 burst in the final four minutes that sealed it.

Galloway's first three kicked off that run with 4;27 to play and Indiana still light on the scoreboard by five.

His second was the dagger, everyone in the Hall gasping as he rose up from NBA range with 1:24 showing.

Nothin' but net, baby. The place erupts; the scoreboard changes to Indiana 61, Ohio State 56; and just look at Galloway, trotting back down the floor wearing a Christmas-morning grin you couldn't have erased with Janitor In A Drum.

Oh, and Ohio State?

After Royal's three at the 12:12 mark, the Buckeyes make just one more. Their last field goal, period, comes with just under six minutes to play.

I don't know what your definition of lockdown D is. But that sounds an awful lot like it.

It also sounds like another rebound in this crazy bounce of a season, when the Hoosiers couldn't win for losing for long stretches and Mike Woodson lost his job because of it. And then, somehow, they found their mojo, or at least some reasonable facsimile. 

Now they've won five of their last seven games -- winning at regular-season conference champ Michigan State and blowing out Purdue at home along the way -- and they've earned a first-round bye in next week's Big Ten tournament. 

Stay tuned for more Reasonable Facsimile. Or not, this being Indiana and all.

But after yesterday, who bets the homestead against it?